Dolunay Soysert

Adana, Ankara, Nebraska

Dolunay Soysert was born in Adana on 25 March 1973 and moved with her family to Ankara at three or four, when her father's work took them there. She finished secondary school in Istanbul and then did two things at once: a degree in art history and archaeology at Istanbul University, and acting classes at the Müjdat Gezen Art Centre. The archaeology never became a career, but the double track is a reasonable description of how she has worked since — academic curiosity attached to a working actor's schedule.

She then left Turkey for several years. She studied drama and theatre at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and took screen-acting training at Sally Johnson Studios in New York, where she lived for three years. The American period matters because it gave her a technique that was not the house style of the Istanbul stage she came back to, and because it put a gap in her early CV at exactly the age most Turkish actors are consolidating television work. She returned, joined Istanbul City Theatres as an actress for four years, and in 2011 added a master's degree in advanced acting from Kadir Has University — at 38, well into an established career.

Her stage debut came in 1995, in an adaptation of Lorca's Blood Wedding directed by Başar Sabuncu. Her first screen credit arrived the same year, in Cemal Gözütok's film Sekizinci Saat. She has not had a long break from either since.

The stage record

The Afife Theatre Awards track her career fairly precisely. She was nominated for Most Successful Supporting Actress for Silvanlı Kadınlar in the first edition of the awards in 1997, two years after her debut. In 2005, at the ninth edition, she won Most Successful Actress for playing Marilyn Monroe in an adaptation of Insignificance at Dostlar Theatre — the role that moved her from promising to established, and which followed a Promising Actress win at the 12th ÇASOD acting awards in 2004. A second Afife nomination for Most Successful Actress came in 2009 for Sürmanşet. In 2007 the 9th Eyüpoğlu Theatre Meeting named her Best Theatre Artist.

In 2006 she co-founded Istanbul Folk Theatre with Bahtiyar Engin and Levent Üzümcü, and performed Can Tarlası there in 2007. The years that followed moved between institutional and independent houses: the Ayşe operetta at the Gülriz Sururi-Engin Cezzar Theatre in 2006, Cam in 2010, Mike Bartlett's Contractions at Craft Theatre in 2015, Kul as a one-woman show at Toy Theatre in 2018, Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage at DasDas in 2019, and Güneyli Bayan in 2020, played opposite Rutkay Aziz.

Kul and Güneyli Bayan both sold out through discount-ticket channels, which says something about where her stage audience sits — not a subscription crowd attached to one building, but people who follow a performer across venues. That pattern is exactly how her current production is being sold.

Screen work, and why the stage keeps winning

The screen half of her career is the better-known half in Turkey. She played Latife Hanım in the 1998 production Cumhuriyet, generally described as her breakthrough, and Gülten in Salkım Hanımın Taneleri in 1999. In film she has specialised in real women: Piraye, the wife of the poet Nâzım Hikmet, in Mavi Gözlü Dev (2007), which won her Best Film Actress at the 3rd Kemal Sunal Culture and Art Awards in 2008; Zübeyde Hanım in Veda (2010); and the architect Mualla Eyüboğlu in Yarım Kalan Mucize (2013). Later films include Kor (2016), Bücür (2018), Hara (2022) and UFO (2022).

On television she was Gracia Mendes Nasi in Muhteşem Yüzyıl (2014), Sumru Güneş in Elimi Bırakma (2018–19), Halide Edib in Ya İstiklal Ya Ölüm (2020), Berna in the streaming drama Terapist (2021) and Derya Öztürk in Tozluyaka (2022). She has also presented — a cooking programme, Tam Kıvamında, and 7'den 77'ye alongside Barış Manço — and worked as an acting coach and commercial voice artist.

Her most recent long-running series role was Neslihan, a wealthy doctor with a history of helping street children, in Yabani for NTC Medya. It ran from 12 September 2023 to its 51st and final episode on 11 January 2025. Within ten weeks of that finale she was back in rehearsal for a two-hander.

Where she stands now

Evlilikte Ufak Tefek Cinayetler — Schmitt's Petits crimes conjugaux, translated by Şehsuvar Aktaş — premiered at Fişekhane's main stage in Istanbul on 17 March 2025, produced by Aysa Prodüksiyon Tiyatrosu and directed by Ersin Umut Güler, with a second performance on 23 March and a run of dates across Turkish cities through 30 April. It is Soysert and Bülent İnal, alone, for eighty minutes: a husband and wife reconstructing a marriage after an accident has taken his memory, with the audience never quite able to establish which of them is lying.

Nineteen months later it is still on sale, which for a Turkish commercial two-hander is a long life. The current block runs from 13 November to 17 December 2026 across seven Istanbul venues, with tickets from ₺1,100 to ₺1,400. Audience scores are solidly positive rather than ecstatic: 4.4 out of 5 from 305 ratings on Biletinial, 212 of them five-star and 26 at three stars, and 7.3 out of 10 from a smaller sample of 45 votes on The House Seat.

On 19 and 20 October 2026 the production stopped being a theatre story and became a news story. A member of the audience filmed part of a scene and posted it, and the clip divided opinion sharply — one camp treating stage nudity as unremarkable in a play about exposure within a marriage, the other asking, in the line that got quoted everywhere, since when nudity counts as a bold scene. Neither performer nor the production company issued a public response. The argument that followed was less about the play than about what Turkish stages are currently allowed to do, and it arrived at the start of the autumn block.

What the production is actually doing

Güler's staging is openly non-naturalistic. The production describes itself as drawing on aesthetic abstraction and contemporary art practice, treating the marriage as a ritual and a labyrinth rather than a living room with a sofa in it, and setting out to dissolve the line between what is happening and what is being performed. Cihan Aşar designed the set, Özlem Kaya the costumes, Yasin Gültepe the lighting, with Sinan Akcan on dramaturgy. In a two-person piece with no interval, those three departments carry most of the scene-changing.

That approach is what the October row collided with. A production built on exposure and reconstruction gets an audience half of which has come from Soysert's television work — Yabani finished on a mainstream commercial channel less than two years ago — and is not expecting an abstracted eighty minutes. The split reading of the clip is, in that sense, a split audience rather than a split critical consensus. The notices themselves have been thin: much of the coverage around the March 2025 opening was announcement rather than review, and no major Turkish critic's verdict on the performances has been widely published.